Providing practical examples since 1998

Things look quiet here. But I've been doing a lot of blogging at
dan.langille.org because I prefer WordPress now.
Not all my posts there are FreeBSD related.
I am in the midst of migrating The FreeBSD Diary over to WordPress
(and you can read about that here).
Once the migration is completed, I'll move the FreeBSD posts into the
new FreeBSD Diary website.

One of the most common and oft-misunderstood steps in installing FreeBSD. But
it's quite straight forward.

Note that 3.1 and above needs two floppies. Previous
versions used only one floppy.

What are boot floppies for?

The boot floppy contains a minature version of FreeBSD. Just enough for it to
see the disk, the network, and to transfer the files it needs in order to install the full
version of the operating system.

Where do you get the files?

You'll either be installing from CD-ROM or the Internet. In either case, each
FreeBSD release you will find a floppies directory and a tools
directory. These contain the files you need, but you don't need everything in those
directories.

If you have a CD-ROM, it will be on the first CD.

When installing from the Internet, you can choose an FTP site from Official mirrors.

Note that the files you are copying are not
DOS files so you can not use regular copy procedures to put them on the floppy.
Remember to use the fdimage.exe tool as found in the tools
directory.

How I did it

For this example, I assume you are installing 3.1-RELEASE.

I always find it easiest
to create boot floppies using my NT box. I used FTP to copy files from pub/FreeBSD/release/3.1-RELEASE/floppies.
In that same directory you will find README.TXT. Please read it. It
contains the instructions for creating floppies.

Then I followed the instructions in README.TEXT (see previous paragraphs for
the location of this file) and created the two floppies. With 2.2.*, only one floppy
was needed. With 3.*, you need two floppies. However, you can create a single
floppy if you use one of those high capacity floppies. See the instructions for
details.

DOS

The following two command will create boot floppies for you. Use one command on
each floppy (i.e. put kern.flp on one, mfsroot.flp on the other).
This step assumes you have downloaded all files to the same directory (in this
case, C:\TEMP but you can use whatever directory you wish).

C:\TEMP>fdimage kern.flp a:

<put a new floppy in the drive>

C:\TEMP>fdimage mfsroot.flp a:

With the above method, I've always been above to create boot floppies.

FreeBSD

Under FreeBSD, it seems to take about 50 seconds to create each floppy.